Easter 1916: analisi e commento in inglese

EASTER 1916 ANALYSIS

Yeats, Easter 1916.

This poem was written to remember the Easter rising in Dublin on 24th April 1916. The rebels, taking advantage from the fact that Britain was weakened by the Great War, tried to fight in order to gain freedom from England. They were betrayed by the people of the country side, and so only 700 people rebelled. The insurgents seized the General Post Office and fought for several days, until they had to surrender. Sixteen of them were executed, and, among them, there were people that Yeats had known personally, the ones that are celebrated into this poem.
The poem is divided into 4 stanzas: the first word, “I” makes us understand that is the poet himself speaking, that what we are going to read is part of his personal experiences. In the same line we [met] meet the word “them”, referring to the rebels: in the following lines the poet tells us that their faces were “vivid” meaning full of life, and we can even understand from the words “counter” or “desk” what their jobs were. The words “nod” and “meaningless” make us understand that they were simple acquaintances:  the poet didn’t know them deeply, in fact he greeted them with a nod of the head or formal and senseless words. Then, the “club” refers to his social elevation.

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EASTER 1916 YEATS ANALISI

The following lines “Being certain that they and I/But lived where motley is worn” refer, like other lines at the end of the 2nd stanza, to the theatre: those rebels lived as they were on stage, sometimes wearing, maybe, a mask. Then, at the end of the first stanza, it’s said that “all changed, changed utterly”, referring to their experience: the rebels were now separated from their happy lives, experiencing a deep transformation, that lead to the birth of a “terrible beauty”, a refrain repeated at the end of the second and the last stanza too, that seems to have similarities with the popular ballads.
In the second stanza we meet the protagonists of the poem: the first one is a woman, and, although not being referred in the poem itself, (like the other characters) we know that she is the countess Constance Markievicz, the only person that wasn’t executed but imprisoned, probably thanks to her social position (enlighten in the poem by the mention of the “harries”, the dogs used to hunt the hares) and the fact that she was a woman.

EASTER 1916 COMMENTO

The poet describes her days spent into “ignorant good will”, in total opposition of her nights, spent arguing and debating until her voice became shrill. Here we can understand a sort of nostalgia of the past into the transformation of her voice, that was sweet, becoming harsh.